INTEGRITY OF IRAN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 306, 24 November 1945, Page 5

INTEGRITY OF IRAN

RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE AGREEMENTS BROKEN (N.Z. Press Association.—Copyright.) , (Special Correspondent.) (Rec. 10-15 a.m.) LONDON, Nov. 23. The gravity of events in Iran, underlined by Mr Eden in the House of Commons, lias caused some concern and misgiving here and is regarded as stilk one more action by Russia which is not calculated to do anything to check the drift of relationship between the Big Powers, r

Reports have been confirmed that Iranian troops, trying to get" to the province of- Azerbaijan to quell a Tudeh separatist rising there, have been stopped at Kazvin by the Russian Command and ordered back. This has been declared here as a breach both of the 1942 Anglo-Soviet treaty of alliance with Iran and of the 1943 Teheran Declaration, in which the United States joined Britain and Russia in affirming their respect for the independence and territorial integrity of Iran. The Manchester Guardian, in a leader, says: “There seems to be no explanation for ■ the , Russians’ act in interfering with the movement of the Iranian Government’s . troops and police except a desire to assert a close ‘sphere of influence,’ within which political movement of their own sponsoring will achieve full control. This action may have had parallels on Russia’s European borders, but it is an unfortunate example to set jusr now when, through AI. Alolotov, Russia makes such warm protestations of her wish for co-operation and peace.. The- Russian Press, too, is permitted to use the occasion as one for general abuse. The events in Iran, protests the Izvestia, are ‘genuinely democratic’ and if there is British criticism of them it is to distract attention from ‘the vast disturbances’ in Palestine and Egypt for which the British are ‘directly responsible’ and the troubles in Indonesia where ‘the national uprising against colonial oppression and injustice has assumed vast proportions.’ This hardly shows a friendly spirit.”

OUTBREAK EXPECTED. The Spectator says it appears impossible to reconcile the Soviet Union’s latest action in Iran with its solemn undertaking to recognise and maintain the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that country. It adds: “Such an outbreak as has occurred has long been expected, and there have been many suspicions that its instigators have been protected and encouraged by the Soviet occupation authorities in North Iran. Indeed such encouragement is openly given in Izvestia’s account of the revolt which describes the insurgents as a body of oppressed, suffering peasants struggling against the tyranny of reactionary landowners. This account varies considerably from other descriptions of the Tudeh movement as an attempt of an adventurous minority to establish a political dictatorship under the protection of the Soviet. The Soviet intervention is tantamount to a declaration that the Iranian Government has no right to maintain its own sovereignty within its own frontiers: whatever the rights and wrongs to the Tudeh movement, they certainly give no excuse for such flagrant interference in the affairs of an independent State. “The action of the Soviet Union is more alarming because of the doubts and suspicions it arouses, in Turkey, and Iraq, both of which have Kurdish minorities to whom the Soviet Union may care to extend its protection.”